The Canadian

The Challenge

Paul Guilbault was born January 21, 1798, in the parish of St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie (Joliette) and baptized the following day. His father was François-Régis Guilbault, a farmer from St-Paul-de-Joliette; his mother was Marie Archange Larivière. They had married at L’Assomption on February 7, 1786. The baptismal record is clear, well-preserved, and thoroughly documented in the PRDH. It is also, in the Quebec record system, the last thing Paul Guilbault ever appears in.

There is no Quebec marriage record. No Quebec death record. No occupation designation in a child’s baptism register — because no children appear in Quebec with him as father. No notarial act. No land transaction. No census appearance in the province. After January 22, 1798, the man who will spend nineteen years in HBC service and be named by a governor’s journal in the mountains of New Caledonia simply does not exist in the Quebec record system.

The silence is not for want of records in the family. The five generations above Paul are thoroughly documented through PRDH, the Gauthier document, and the same record system that then falls silent on him:

Paul’s father François (b. 1760) and his uncle — the Guilbault family’s great voyageur Gabriel (b. 1762, son of Charles × Deguise Flamand’s son Gabriel b. 1731) — had shaped the family’s relationship to the fur trade. Gabriel’s NWC service brought him to Oka Mission, where he married Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe in 1801. His brother Paul père (b. 1761), the “Invisible Voyageur” of the companion case study, had worked for the North West Company in the Athabasca Department in 1820–1821 — and then come home to St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie, converted his wages into grain annuities, and died a cultivateur in 1831. His children and grandchildren remained in Quebec.

Paul (b. 1798) entered HBC service the same year his older cousin’s NWC account was settled. He was twenty-three years old. He left in the same season the fur trade world was reconstituting itself after the 1821 merger. He never came back.

The absence of Quebec records for Paul after 1798 is meaningful negative evidence — but it is not an explanation. Men who spent the full span of their working lives in the interior and never returned to Quebec are well-documented in the HBC record system. Their Quebec parishes simply closed the file with the baptism entry. The investigation must go where Paul went: west.

The Breakthrough

Three things stand out in these entries. First, McDonald identifies Paul as “a Canadian” before naming him — the category designation that placed French-Canadian employees within the HBC’s carefully stratified workforce. Paul was recognized as a Canadian in the interior, not as an anonymous figure requiring introduction. Second, he was leading four Indigenous carriers independently, not traveling as part of a named officer’s party. This is the work of an experienced interior transport man operating on his own authority. Third, he completed the round trip: McLeod Lake to Fort St. James and back, through difficult mountain terrain, arriving with all loads delivered. He was thirty years old and seven years into his HBC service.

Governor Simpson’s party at the time included some of the most significant figures in Pacific Northwest history: James Douglas (later Governor of British Columbia), William Connolly (Chief Factor), Richard Hamlyn (surgeon), and Colin Fraser (Simpson’s piper, who played bagpipes to “the great astonishment of the natives” on the same portage Paul had just traversed). Paul Guilbault worked the same territory, the same season, in the same landscape — invisible to history because he was a carrier, not a gentleman, and the gentlemen wrote the journals.

The Result

The Early Oregonians Database (Oregon State Archives) records Guilbeau, Paul: born ca. 1800, died ca. 1849, arrived Oregon 1833 — five years after the McDonald journal placed him on the McLeod Lake portage. He arrived at Fort Vancouver by 1831, when the Munnick annotation A-34 records he was sent from Fort Walla Walla to join John Work’s Snake Country brigade. A provisional land grant at Champoeg (Vol. 3, Pg. 079) was filed September 7, 1846. He did not live to patent the claim under the Donation Land Claim Act.

Record M-18 in the Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver Vol. I) documents Paul Guilbault’s marriage to Caty Sakaïan, Walla Walla by nation, on December 29, 1838, at Fort Vancouver. Paul was in service of the Honorable Company of Hudson’s Bay, domiciled at Fort Vancouver. Witnesses: James Douglas, Esquire, and William Fraser Tolmie, Esquire. Three pre-nuptial children were recognized as legitimate at the ceremony: François (aged 6, born ~1832), Louis (aged 2, born ~1836), and Paul (aged 7 months, born 1838). Caty Sakaïan was baptized the same day as B-213, the record immediately preceding the marriage entry in the same register.

The Catholic registers document six children of Paul and Caty across five years:

• François — recognized at marriage, born ~1832; re-confirmed B-876, baptized January 29, 1843 at approximately 11 years, with godfather Hilaire Guilbeau and godmother Louise Walla Walla
• Louis — recognized at marriage, born ~1836; B-46/47, baptized November 29, 1840, aged 5½ years
• Paul — recognized at marriage, born 1838; B-46/47, baptized November 29, 1840, aged 2½ years
• Marie — B-41, baptized June 20, 1841, born May 29; godfather Michel Cotnoir, godmother Mathilde Fagnant
• François (B-876) — baptized January 29, 1843; godfather Hilaire Guilbeau; godmother Louise Walla Walla
• A sixth child referenced in the Munnick A-34 annotation — not yet individually identified in the register record

Caty Walla Walla died in 1848. The Munnick annotation confirms six children total.

B-876 makes explicit what the Gauthier document implied with the phrase “linked to Hilaire Guilbault.” When Paul’s son François was baptized in January 1843, Hilaire Guilbeau stood as his godfather, with Hilaire’s own wife Louise Walla Walla as godmother. The two cousins once removed were not merely in the same Oregon community — they were godparents to each other’s children. The Early Oregonians Database records Hilaire’s own marriage to Louise Walla Walla in April 1842, with four of her children adopted at the same ceremony (M-2). These families were interwoven.

The Munnick index for Vancouver Vol. I lists Paul Guilbault on more than fifteen separate pages — as godfather, as witness at burials (S-3, S-4, S-8, S-9, S-11 in 1840–1841), and as present at baptisms across the Fort Vancouver community through 1843. He served as godfather to the child of Thomas Tawakon, Iroquois — a family he was apparently close enough to that after his first wife Caty died, he married Tawakon’s widow. He was a witness at the burial of Marie and Joseph, Cowlitz nation, in December 1840. He was godfather to Michel, child of the engagé Louis le frisé, in July 1839. The index is a map of a man embedded in his community.

After Caty’s death, Paul married Françoise Cayuse (also identified as Walla Walla by nation in the Early Oregonians Database) on November 5/6, 1848, in Marion County, Oregon. The Early Oregonians Database records Françoise (also called Louise; alias “—, Louise”) as born ca. 1810, with prior marriages to Thomas Tewatcon (Vancouver Co., July 8, 1839) and Paul Guilbeau. After Paul’s death she married Laurent Sauvé on April 9, 1850, and survived to the 1880 census in Wasco County. B-173 (July 4, 1839) also records Paul as godfather for Pierre Tawakon — son of Thomas Tawakon and Françoise Walla Walla — the year of her first marriage, confirming the long friendship the Munnick annotation describes.